When a maker's product goes live on RadarMakers , we want search engines to know about the new page without waiting for a crawler to find it. IndexNow is a small protocol for exactly that: you send the URLs that changed, and the participating search engines are told about them. This post shows our Go client, the key file it needs, and what the protocol actually promises.

What IndexNow asks for

The IndexNow documentation describes two things.

A key you can prove you own. The key is 8 to 128 characters of letters, numbers and dashes. You host it in a UTF-8 text file, by default named after the key and placed at the root of the site, for example https://example.com/your-key.txt , and the file contains the key. The documentation strongly recommends the root location. A file elsewhere on the host has to be named in each request with keyLocation , and then only covers URLs under its own folder.

A request listing the changed URLs.…